We stayed in this hotel for a week and were delighted we made that choice. Enea and his sister Iris are the perfect hosts. We really felt part of the family rather than customers. The hotel offers exceptional value for money and is very clean.
The rooms have all the essentials, including a comfortable bed and plenty of storage space and free Wi-Fi. We hired a car at the airport and must say that finding it is indeed a challenge. In the end I went up to a motorbike policeman and pointed desperately at my useless map (very little English is spoken here, although Italian is quite useful) and he was kind enough to lead us onto the right road.
The hotel is a way out of town, but only 10 minutes by car if you don't get lost or stuck in a traffic jam! It was great having a Carrefour supermarket 5 minutes away. There isn't much to do in the locality in the evenings, so if you are into that sort of thing, best to stay in Tirana itself. There are no English speaking channels on the TV either, but you can catch films in English with subtitles sometimes and there is a Tirana news channel which has English subtitles.
Breakfast is ample and along with the standard cereals, fruit, meats and cheese and salad, bread and rolls and cakes, we were made freshly cooked eggs and sausages, which set us up nicely for the day.
We ate in the hotel restaurant in the evenings because it was so lovely and fresh, huge portions and extremely reasonable prices. The house wine is very nice too.
There are some beautiful places to visit nearby as well as the famous ones. Our hosts took endless trouble to make sure we went the right way to all the places we wanted to visit. The only problem is that due to the erratic road network and volume of traffic, it does take a long time to travel relatively short distances. Elbasan is a very interesting town nearby, so is Kruje and Durres. For day trips we went to Lake Ohrid and Podradec, Shkoder in the north, with a wonderful castle and it is possible to visit Berat in a day. Don't miss the cable car in north Tirana, although it is not that easy to find!
If you are thinking of hiring a car, beware, the driving is possibly the worst I have ever seen anywhere and there are no signposts and very few street names. However if you have a good GPS you should be OK (we didn't!) and it is the best way to visit the country independently.
I would not hesitate to recommend the Hotel Viktoria and want to go back there again.
